A walled university in the middle of the city, founded in 1592, with a ninth-century illuminated gospel book and a library that looks the way libraries are supposed to look.
The college
Elizabeth I chartered it in 1592 on the site of a dissolved monastery, at that point outside the city walls. Catholics were barred from taking degrees until 1793 and the Catholic Church discouraged its own members from attending until 1970, which tells you most of what you need to know about the institution’s position in Irish life for four centuries.
It is still a working university of about 20,000 students, and the campus is a walled forty-seven acres in the dead centre of Dublin. Walking in through the front gate off College Green and finding cobbled squares, a bell tower and a cricket pitch is one of the better surprises in the city.
The Book of Kells
An illuminated manuscript of the four gospels in Latin, made around 800 AD, probably by monks on Iona and finished at Kells in County Meath after Viking raids drove them inland. It is 340 folios of vellum, and the decoration is dense to the point of absurdity — interlace, animals, human figures worked into initials, and pages where a single letter fills the sheet.
Two volumes are on display, one open at a page of text and one at a decorated page, and the pages are turned periodically. It is behind glass, in a dark room, and you will get perhaps ninety seconds in front of it before the flow of people moves you on.
That is worth saying plainly: the manuscript itself is a brief encounter. The exhibition leading to it is good and does the explanatory work, and the room after it is the reason most people remember the visit.
The Long Room
The main chamber of the Old Library: 65 metres of oak barrel vaulting, two storeys of shelving holding around 200,000 of the library’s oldest books, marble busts of philosophers down the length of it, and Ireland’s oldest harp in a case at the end — the one on the coinage and the Guinness label.
It has been under a major conservation project, with the books removed shelf by shelf for cleaning and cataloguing, so what you see depends on when you go. Check before travelling if the room is the reason you are going.
Practical
Book a timed ticket online. The queue on a summer morning without one is long and the slots do sell out.
The first slot of the day is the quietest by a wide margin.
Free guided campus tours run from inside the front gate in season, led by students, and are good value even if you skip the exhibition.
More Landmarks
Dublin Castle
Seven hundred years of English rule administered from one courtyard, and almost none of it looks like a castle. The Viking foundations underneath are the best part.
Ha'penny Bridge
A cast-iron footbridge from 1816 that charged a halfpenny to cross for a century. Free now, and the most photographed object in the city.